The Mutual Housing Experiment: New Deal Communities for the Urban Middle Class

Abstract

Kristin M. Szylvian's meticulously researched study of the mutual housing movement from the New Deal to the 1950s provides rich insights into urban conditions of the time and national public policy debates. She illustrates ably that the movement for a national mutual housing program (with lodging built by the federal government and sold to resident-owned cooperatives) faced so many challenges that it is remarkable that any communities were built. Szylvian's early chapters trace the roots and rise of the mutual housing ideal and the career of its greatest champion, the New Dealer Lawrence Westbrook. Much of the text, however, focuses on the successful opposition that mutual housing plans aroused from many within Franklin D. Roosevelt's cabinet, conservative members of Congress, local politicians, and neighbors; only a few New Deal communities, most supported by unions, broke ground. Wider implementation occurred only as part of the thousands of units of permanent defense housing created under the Lanham Act during World War II. After many political battles during and after the war, however, perhaps fifteen thousand of these defense units were actually converted to mutual housing; most permanent defense housing was sold to private owners or converted to public housing. Szylvian then shows how proponents of postwar-era mutual housing, such as Alabama congressman John Sparkman and the indefatigable Westbrook, failed to gain passage of laws that would finance cooperatives because of continued conservative opposition and changing tastes. Szylvian ends by describing life in the remaining mutual housing communities, counting successes and failure.